IF YOU GO:

If your band is doing 51 shows in 50 states and the District of Columbia in 51 days you could speak floridly about how, yes, it’s grueling, but it’s a gift to the fans for all their love over the years.

Or, if you’re plain spoken like Buzz Osborne, leader of veteran rockers The Melvins, you could tell it like it is.

“What I want to do is something that’s big and crazy. It’s a big publicity stunt,” Osborne said of the tour of the band Melvins Lite, a pared-down version of the legendary Seattle-area group. The tour’s Vermont appearance happens Friday at Higher Ground.

Speaking in a phone interview last month from Los Angeles, his home of the past 20 years, Osborne downplayed how hard it will be to play 51 shows in the same number of days. He said he’s done more than 30 shows on consecutive days, so the idea of lots of gigs in a short period of time isn’t a foreign one.

“Playing music isn’t necessarily the easiest job in the world, but it’s also not the hardest,” Osborne said, adding that coal miners and farmers work harder and longer days. “It’s all relative as far as that’s concerned. We’re working hard compared to Metallica. We’re not working hard compared to a Vermont farmer.”

The Melvins loud, sludgy brand of rock got going in the mid-1980s, and Osborne said it took awhile for the band to succeed. They got a big push when Nirvana hit it big in the early ‘90s, and Kurt Cobain, a former roadie for The Melvins, gave the band credit as an influence.

Nirvana, of course, went on to become the most significant rock band of the decade that spawned the grunge sound. Osborne, though, doesn’t talk about Nirvana as if the band changed the face of music.

He said it’s not surprising that Nirvana sold a lot of records — “It’s basically pop music like Chuck Berry did in the 1950s,” according to Osborne. He said it’s just that Nirvana’s success, which led to the usual rock cliches of drug habits and divorces, didn’t change things in the way predecessors such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and Johnny Rotten did.

Osborne aims for different on a regular basis. Melvins Lite whittles down The Melvins’ two-drummer sound in favor of stand-up bass, though as played by Trevor Dunn it’s a raucous stand-up bass that creates an extra layer of darkness for the trio’s hard-rock sound.

“I’m always looking for something new to do that sometimes has little or no bearing to do with what we’ve done in the past,” Osborne said.

He’s also willing to give creative control to others. “I’ve never been afraid of those sorts of things,” Osborne said. “I’ve heard of people who are (afraid), who think they know everything, and that’s not a fun place to be in. I trust the people we have and try to remain open-minded.”

The desire to do something different has been a part of Osborne’s modus operandi for his whole career, which ranged from those first half-dozen years or so when the band made no money to the big-label era with Atlantic Records in the 1990s. Osborne hates to look back.

“I’m not a good-old-days kind of guy,” he said. “Move forward or die like a dinosaur, that’s what I say.”